Discover is the UK’s first Story Centre for children aged 0-11 and their families. As a not for profit organisation, our aim is to support a love of language, literature and stories.
At the heart of the centre, our purpose-built Story World and Story Garden are creative play spaces designed to inspire children’s curiosity and imagination. We help improve reading, writing, speaking and listening skills for children in fun and imaginative ways. Hootah, our resident baby space alien, is always on the look-out, encouraging children to create their own stories to send back to his planet Squiggly Diggly.
Changing annually, our interactive exhibitions immerse families in the worlds of their favourite authors and illustrators, from Michael Rosen to Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler to Judith Kerr.
Our Story Builders lead our interactive exhibition sessions and 0-3’s Storytelling, and pop up in the Story Worlds and Story Garden to tell more tales.
Throughout the year we invite much-loved and up-and-coming authors, illustrators and other artists to run exciting events.
We also work in schools, libraries community spaces and at festivals. Last year over 100,000 children and adults engaged with Discover.
We have been awarded the Visitor Attraction Quality Assurance marque from Visit Britain and the Learning Outside the Classroom kitemark. Time Out voted Discover one of London’s top five family days out and named our bookshop as one of the top five children’s bookshops in London.
See what happens in a child’s mind when they visit Discover…
At Discover, stories come to life and imagination sparks. Each visit builds a love of stories, books and reading from the foundations of creative play.
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Thank you to The Mercer’s Company and Media Trust for helping us to make this film, exploring how children play, create and learn in our spaces. Thank you to the wonderful families who took part in the filming. Thank you to our brilliant Story Builder Valentine. And thank you to the film crew who brought the children’s imaginations and experiences to visual life, so grown-ups could understand them too.